Cognitive Science
Offered at IU Bloomington by College of Arts and Sciences
About
Cognitive science explores the nature of intelligent systems, focusing on formal theories of mind and information and seeks a better understanding of mind, learning and teaching, cognitive skills, and the development of intelligent systems designed to augment human capacities in constructive ways.
Both natural intelligence (in humans and in animals) and artificial intelligence fall within the scope of inquiry.
The Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science stresses hands-on, active learning, where students work with concrete examples in the classroom and labs, joining into research as soon as they enter the degree program.
The field is inherently interdisciplinary, with contributions from computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, anthropology, and other fields. It deals with aspects of complex cognition, computational models of thought processing, knowledge representation, dynamics of real-world engagement, and emergent behavior of large-scale interacting systems.
The Cognitive Science program is structured to give students fundamental skills, applicable in a wide variety of information-related careers: psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, media, information processing, medical analysis, data representation and information retrieval, education, scientific research, human-computer interaction, multimedia, knowledge management, and information policy. The skills also have wide applicability to technical and expository writing, mathematical analysis, experimental techniques, and computer programming.